Guides · Work · 18 min read · Updated September 2026

Workplaces

The tradition applied to the office and the shop. The city where a bank’s escalators were set on a geomancer’s advice, the till the commercial manuals place and the one most shops have, the reception that sees the door, the desk with a wall behind it in an open plan, the corner office that has always meant one thing, and the meeting room’s host. What transfers from the house, and what the research on offices adds.

Oriented NW 318°

Metal

Fig. 01 An office in daylight. The tradition’s rules for a workplace are its rules for a house, applied to more people at once.

The manuals have chapters on offices, and most of what is in them is the house again: the entrance is a reception, the living room is the open plan, the bedroom is the office with a door, and the rules are the rules for a bed, a seat and a desk applied to more people at once. What changes is that nobody chooses their own position. This guide begins in the city where the tradition is most commercial, draws a shop and an office the tradition’s way, and says which of its rules survive contact with a facilities manager.

The city of commercial feng shui

Commercial feng shui has a capital, and it is Hong Kong. Emmons’s survey of the territory in the early 1990s found that a large share of its businesses had consulted a geomancer, most often for the opening of premises, and that what they asked about was the door, the till, the desk of the boss and the date; Bruun’s history finds the same practice among the diaspora from Singapore to Vancouver, and in the mainland’s cities since the 1990s. Two buildings made it famous. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s headquarters of 1985 was planned with a geomancer’s advice at several stages, and its escalators from the plaza were set at an angle to the entrance rather than square to it, on the reasoning that a straight run from the street would carry qi, and money, straight out; the Bank of China tower beside it, finished in 1990, rose as a shaft of sharp triangular facets, which the city’s practitioners read at once as blades aimed at its neighbours, and the older bank was said to have answered by pointing the two window-cleaning gantries on its roof at the tower like cannon. The story is told in every account of the city and it is half folklore; what is not folklore is that the buildings were read this way by the people who worked in them, and that the readings were the ordinary ones of the tradition, the straight line at the door and the edge aimed at the seat, at the scale of a skyline.

The till

Fig. 01 The till, twice, in a shop of five metres by four with its door and window on the street. A: the counter where the commercial manuals put it, on the side wall toward the back, so that the person at it sees the door and the whole shop without standing in the door’s line, has a solid wall behind, and has the floor of the shop, the bright hall, in front; the customer arrives across the open floor and the goods are between the door and the till. B: the counter where most shops put it, just inside the door with its back to the window, so that the person at it has the street behind them, cannot see who comes in without turning, and stands in the line from the door to the back of the shop; the manuals read it as the mouth of the business blocked and the till exposed, and the retailer reads it as a counter that gets in the way of the door and a back to the pavement. The tradition’s till is the command position with a cash drawer. The arrangement is the one Emmons’s Hong Kong shopkeepers described consulting a geomancer for, and the one Bruun records in the commercial manuals: the till off the door’s line, backed, and seeing the door, with water or a plant between it and the entrance if the school allows. Scale 40 units to the metre.

The till is the command position with a cash drawer. The manuals place it on a side wall toward the back of the shop, so that the person at it sees the door and the whole floor without standing in the door’s line, has a solid wall behind, and has the shop’s floor, the bright hall, in front of them, with the goods between the door and the till; the customer crosses the floor to pay and the till is the last thing reached. Most shops put the counter just inside the door with its back to the window, and the manuals read it as the two faults at once: the mouth of the business blocked by a counter across it, and the till exposed, its keeper with the street behind them and the door out of their sight. The retailer’s reading is the same in other words, a counter that gets in the way of the door and a back to the pavement, and the drawing gives both. The shop guide takes the same counter into a shop of its own and adds what this one has no room for, the mouth and its bright hall, the path a customer actually walks and the two decades of filmed shoppers that timed it.

Reception

The reception desk is the command position for a building: it sees the door, it is not in the door’s line, and it has a wall or a screen behind it. A receptionist with their back to the entrance, or seated square in front of the door so that every arrival is met head-on, is the arrangement the manuals name first. Behind the desk, the tradition wants something solid; beside it, light; in front of it, room to stand, which is the ming tang and the queue.

Plan 02 An office: reception seeing the door, desks with a wall or a screen behind, the corner office in command, the meeting room with a host’s seat The entrance is at the bottom left and reception faces it. The desks along the left are backed by the wall or by a screen between the pairs, with the windows at their side; the three red-centred circles are the plants that break the aisle. The corner office at the top right has the wall behind its chair and the door in view, which is what the phrase corner office has always meant. The meeting room’s host sits with the wall behind and the door in view. The ghosted row of desks along the bottom faces the aisle with the door at its back, the arrangement open-plan offices produce by default.

The tradition reads a workplace from its door inward, as it reads a house. The entrance is the mouth of qi; the reception is its ming tang; the open floor is the hall, where the people are; and the rooms with doors, the manager’s and the meeting room, are the private rooms at the back. Every rule that follows is a rule from elsewhere on this site, with the furniture renamed.

Desks in an open plan

An open-plan office is a room in which nobody has a wall, and the tradition’s answer is to make walls. Desks go against the real walls where there are real walls, with the window at the side; where there are none, a screen behind the chair does the wall’s job, and pairs of desks share a screen back to back rather than face to face. The desks the manuals dislike are the ones in the middle of the floor facing an aisle, with the door somewhere behind: the ghosted row in the plan. Where a row cannot move, the chairs can turn, so that the aisle is at the sitter’s side rather than at their back, and the command position essay draws what a turned chair does to the field of view.

Evidence · Enclosure, light, air

Alexander’s pattern for workspace enclosure, a wall behind, a view ahead, partial enclosure at the sides, was drawn from watching where office workers choose to sit, and Sommer’s seating studies found the same preference for protected positions; Robson’s review of restaurant seating found diners choosing the anchored table, against a wall or a partition, before the open one, and staying longer at it. Boubekri and colleagues found that office workers with windows slept longer at night than those without; Küller and colleagues followed nearly a thousand office workers for a year and found mood tracking the light; Allen and colleagues found cognitive scores rising sharply with better ventilation. None of it is feng shui. All of it is what the tradition asks of a desk: a back covered, a window at the side, and air.

Fig. 03 Two desks in one room, in three plans with the door at the bottom. A: back to back with a screen between the chairs, so that each sitter has something solid behind and both see the door at an angle. B: side by side against one wall, the pair the manuals draw for a shared study, with the door in view of both. C, ghosted: face to face across the room, which puts each person in the other’s line of sight all day and leaves both backs open to the room. The rule for two desks is the rule for one, applied twice without either breaking the other’s. A and B satisfy it; C is what an office produces when two desks are pushed together, and what the seating research calls the confrontation position.

Two desks in one room are the case the drawing sorts, and the sorting is the command position applied twice. Back to back with a screen between gives each sitter something solid behind and both the door at an angle, which is the pair the tradition prefers and the open-plan office rarely draws. Side by side against one wall gives one wall to two people and the door to both, the arrangement of a shared study. Face to face across the room, the default when two desks are pushed together, puts each person in the other’s line of sight all day and leaves both backs open, which the seating research calls the confrontation position and the tradition calls two people with no wall.

The open plan, measured

Fig. 04 The open-plan studies, as a ledger. Five findings about rooms in which nobody has a wall. Bernstein and Turban fitted the staff of two firms with sensors before and after their move to open plan and found face-to-face interaction falling by about seventy per cent, with email and messaging rising to replace it: the room built for talk produced less of it. Kim and de Dear’s post-occupancy surveys, across more than forty thousand workers and three hundred buildings, found open-plan workers the least satisfied with sound privacy and noise and found none of the promised gain in interaction. Banbury and Berry found overheard conversation the sound that disturbs most, and found that people do not get used to it. Evans and Johnson put clerical workers in three hours of ordinary open-office noise and measured raised stress hormones, fewer attempts at hard problems and fewer changes of posture. Sommer, forty years earlier, watched where people sit when they can choose and found them taking the wall behind and the view of the room, and defending the seat. The last column is what each supports in the tradition’s terms: walls down, talk down; noise and privacy before decoration; speech the enemy, not the machines; a quiet desk a working desk; and the command position, observed in the wild before anyone wrote it on a plan. Sizes as reported. Bernstein and Turban 2018 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; Kim and de Dear 2013 in the Journal of Environmental Psychology; Banbury and Berry 2005 in Ergonomics; Evans and Johnson 2000 in the Journal of Applied Psychology; Sommer 1969, Personal Space.

The evidence note gives the studies that support the desk; the ledger above gives the ones that measured the room, and they are the reason the site treats the open plan as a problem to be solved rather than a style to be decorated. Bernstein and Turban fitted the staff of two firms with wearable sensors before and after a move from offices to open plan and found face-to-face interaction falling by about seventy per cent, with email and messaging rising to fill the gap: the room built to make people talk made them retreat behind headphones and screens, which is the tradition’s reading of a hall with no walls arrived at by instrument. Kim and de Dear’s post-occupancy surveys, more than forty thousand workers in three hundred buildings, found the open plan’s occupants the least satisfied of any layout with sound privacy and noise, and found that the promised ease of interaction did not appear in the data at all; Banbury and Berry found overheard conversation the sound that disturbs most and found that people do not get used to it over months; Evans and Johnson, in a laboratory office, found three hours of ordinary open-office noise enough to raise stress hormones and to make people give up sooner on hard problems. Sommer had watched the same thing from the other side forty years earlier, in libraries and cafeterias, where people who could choose took the seat with the wall behind and the room in view and defended it. What the five together say is that the tradition’s rule for a desk, a wall behind and a view of the door, is a rule about attention and not about qi, that the noise is the open plan’s real sha and the screen its real cure, and that a manager who wants the collaboration the layout promised should measure it before buying the plants.

Choosing a desk

1Best · a wall behind, the door seen at a diagonal, the window at the side
2Good · a wall behind and the door in view; the light from the front, a blind needed
3Poor · the back to the aisle or the light straight ahead; a screen or a turn of the chair mends one
4Worst · the back to the door’s line or under the vent, facing a wall; refuse it, or bring the screen

Plan 05 Choosing a desk in an open plan An open-plan floor of twelve by nine metres with twelve desks, the door at the south-west corner, the window wall to the east, the aisle down the middle and the meeting room in the north-west; the desks are graded by the three conditions the tradition and the research agree on, a wall behind, the door in view, the light from the side, with the vent marked because the research adds it. The best two desks are the north-east pair: the wall behind, the door seen across the room at a diagonal, the window at the side, and out of the door’s line. The north-west pair keep the wall and the door but face the light. The middle island has no wall on either side, which the screen between the pairs partly mends, and the south row sits with its back to the aisle and its face to a wall, which is the command position inverted; the two desks in the door’s line and the one under the vent are the room’s worst, and a person who can choose should choose anything else. A person who cannot choose has the workplaces guide’s toolkit: a screen, a turn of the chair, a lamp and, for the vent, a word with facilities.

A person who can choose a desk, on a first day or in a hot-desking office each morning, has the plan above, which grades twelve desks by the three conditions the tradition and the research share and adds the one the research contributes. The best desks are the ones with a wall behind, the door seen across the room at a diagonal and the window at the side, and they are usually the corner farthest from the door, which is why the tradition gave that corner to the head of the house and why it is taken first in every office that lets people choose; Sommer’s seat-choosers found it without a manual. The second grade keeps the wall and the door but faces the light, which the desk placement guide mends with a blind. The third has either no wall or the light straight ahead, and a screen or a turn of the chair mends one of the two. The fourth is the row the manuals drew ghosted: the back to the aisle, the face to a wall, the door’s line across the chair, or the vent overhead, which the air guide adds because a draught on the neck is the one open-plan complaint that has nothing to do with sight lines. A person who cannot choose has the toolkit already on this page, a screen behind the chair, the chair turned so the aisle is at the side, a lamp for the corner and the plant as a wall; and a manager laying out a floor has the same plan in reverse, which is to put the desks where the grades are high and the meeting rooms where they are low, since a meeting room does not care which way it faces.

The corner office

The phrase has always meant what the tradition means: two solid walls, the door in view, the window at the side, and the chair in the far corner from the door. The manager’s chair has the wall behind it; the desk stands between the chair and the door; the visitor’s chair, which faces the manager, has the door at its back, which is the seat the tradition gives to guests everywhere. A manager who sits with their back to the door, or facing a window with the room behind them, has the corner office without its point.

Meeting rooms

The meeting room is the dining room of the office, and its rules are the same. The host sits with the wall behind and the door in view; nobody sits with their back to the door if the room allows it; the table is round or oval where it can be, so that no one sits at a corner and no one is at the head of a long table by accident; and the screen goes at the end of the room that is not behind the host, so that the people facing the host are not also facing a glowing wall.

Light, air, plants

Side light where people work; task lamps at the desks and the ceiling grid dimmed where it can be; plants at the ends of aisles and in the corners daylight does not reach, where they break the long lines the tradition reads as sha and the eye reads as a corridor. Air matters more than any of it: an office that cannot be ventilated is, in the tradition’s terms, an office in which qi has stopped. What Allen measured was a sealed laboratory office with twenty-four people in it and not anybody’s workplace; what he found there was that the worse air made the worse decisions, which is reason enough to ventilate the room.

Checklist

The door visible, lit, and not run at by a stair, an escalator or a road
The till on a side wall toward the back: sees the door, off its line, wall behind
Reception sees the door, off its line, with a wall or screen behind
Desks against the walls or with a screen behind the chair; window at the side
No row of desks facing an aisle with the door at its back
The manager’s chair in the far corner, wall behind, door in view; the visitor’s chair facing it
Meeting room: host backed and seeing the door; round or oval table; screen not behind the host
Plants at the ends of aisles; lamps at the desks; the ceiling grid dimmed
Windows that open, or ventilation that works